The Crack in the Screen

Wang could not sleep. He lay in his own chamber and listened to the house settle around him, beam by beam, and the priest's words kept rising out of the dark like bubbles from deep water, breaking on the surface of his mind.

Before dawn he rose, dressed in the dark, and went quietly down to the garden. The moon was down; the garden room was dark from without, but a thin line of light lay along the bottom of its door, as though a lamp burned within.

He had never seen the woman keep a lamp. She always waited for him in darkness, and when he left, the room was dark again, as though the darkness itself had been holding its breath until he was gone.

He crept to the window. The paper was thin enough, and there was a place near the corner where it had shrunk away from the wood. He put his eye to the crack, and his heart knocked against his ribs.

At first he saw nothing but lamplight, and the pale shape of a chair, and the long shadow the lamp made on the wall. Then his eyes grew used to the inside of the room, and his blood seemed to stop cold in his chest.

Standing in the middle of the room was no woman. It was a thing the color of wet moss, green to the neck, with a face of crumpled mud and eyes like two holes punched in paper. Its mouth was stretched too wide, and it did not look toward the door; it was too busy.

Spread upon the table before it was a sheet of pale skin, like the skin a butcher hangs to dry in a back room. The thing held a fine brush, and with terrible care, stroke by stroke, it was painting the skin. It drew the eyes first, then the brows, then the small, soft mouth he had come to know.

It was painting a face. He had been living inside the face. The thing that had wept on the stone beside the poplar road was the face it had already finished, laid aside for the moment like a painted sleeve hung on a peg.

The brush moved without trembling. The demon did not hum or mutter; it worked as a careful artisan works, certain of its craft. Once it paused, and lifted the painted skin and shook it out, and the skin settled into the shape of a woman so naturally that Wang had to catch his breath.

He made no sound. He backed away from the window, step by step, his hands gone cold enough that he thought they must belong to someone else. He did not run; he was afraid the house itself would hear, and wake, and understand what lived in its garden.

He reached his own room and bolted the door, and there he sat until the first grey of morning, holding the paper charm the Taoist had given him, his fingers pressing it flat against his palm.

He understood at last that he had not been keeping a guest. A guest had been keeping him, warming itself at the small fires of his kindness, waiting for him to be fat enough, and soft enough, and accustomed enough to be eaten.

When the rooster crowed, he did not feel relief. He felt only the long, sick certainty that the next night would be the night, and that he had somehow already agreed to it.